It’s interesting, the stuff you find online.

Just the other day, I logged on to do a simple search for something on the Web. I ended up getting sucked in, clicking my way from link to link as through tripping along a stepping stone path that made Homer’s Odyssey seem like the travelogue of a summer road trip.

But, much as I did online the other day, I digress.

While tooling around in that virtual rabbit hole, I discovered quite by accident that two of my haiku had been published in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of the Oxford, England-based World Haiku Review. And not only that – one of those haiku had actually won Third Place in the “Vanguard” category, and the other was published as a “Haiku of Merit” in the “Neo-Classical” category.

World Haiku Review describes Vanguard haiku as “the most radical” treatments of the haiku genre. Here’s my haiku in that category. I don’t stick to the traditional 5-7-5 syllable count, and there’s an uncomfortable tension between nature and human nature that complicates how the relationship between humans and the natural world is portrayed in traditional haiku.

World Haiku Review uses the term “Neo-Classical” to designate what they describe as “the most traditional” haiku they publish. Scroll down a bit to see my Neo-Classical “Haiku of Merit.”

Enjoy all of the haiku in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of World Haiku Review.

Thank you, editors Susumu Takiguchi, Kala Ramesh, and Rohini Gupta, for publishing my work in your journal. I am honored.